President Obama plans to set off Wednesday on a Western tour passing through one of the reddest states in the union, where he will try to turn the Keystone pipeline story into a positive tale about his overall energy policy. On the way to Oklahoma - the starting point of the southern half of the controversial pipeline - Obama plans to highlight the approval of dozens of oil pipelines during his time in office. Although the full Keystone line from Canada to Texas failed to get a permit earlier this year, the company is moving forward with the southern portion.

Siegfried S. Hecker, a research scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory since 1973, will become the laboratory's new director, University of California President David P. Gardner announced. Hecker, 42, will assume responsibility in January for a laboratory with a $690-million budget in fiscal 1985 and a staff of 7,900, making it the largest employer in northern New Mexico.

General Electric Co. is working with Google Inc. to develop a so-called smart electrical grid that can make better use of power derived from renewable energy. The companies will jointly lobby U.S. lawmakers and collaborate on technologies to make alternative energy sources, such as wind, geothermal and solar, commercially successful. The partnership was unveiled at a news conference at Google's offices in Mountain View, Calif. With a smart grid, people would be able to monitor individual energy use, sell energy back to utilities from electric-car batteries and program appliances to turn on at times when electricity is least expensive, a spokeswoman said.

SACRAMENTO -- Gov. Jerry Brown will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu next week in Silicon Valley to sign a trade, research and economic development pact between Israel and California. The agreement, Brown's office announced Friday, will emphasize cooperation on water conservation, alternative energy, cybersecurity, health and biotechnology, education and agricultural technology. It also will allow Israeli companies to access California's Innovation Hub program, in which research parks, federal laboratories and universities collaborate with businesses, venture capitalists and economic development organizations.

The Republican National Committee has dropped $3.4 million to blast Barack Obama's energy policy on television in four key states. The 30-second spot charges that the Illinois senator opposes lower gas taxes, nuclear power and more oil drilling: "Just the party line." John McCain, it touts, is "pushing his own party to face climate change" and supports "alternative energy, conservation, suspending the gas tax and more production here at home."

As chairman of the County and Cities of Los Angeles Energy Commission, I can only reiterate that most elected officials and our public energy agencies have not done enough to plan ahead--and, as a result, the American public is in many ways more vulnerable today than it was in the 1970s. Today, for example, alternative energy sources can produce substantial amounts of power that are nonpolluting and at a price competitive with foreign oil. In the past five years, the cost of solar power has been slashed dramatically, from 24 cents to eight cents per kilowatt hour.

Physician Gale may be an expert in cancer treatment, but as a layman on alternative energy, he should get his facts straight. Photovoltaics has been used reliably since the late 1950s for space power, and since the 1970s it has become a viable, pollution-free, quiet alternative energy source that uses only sunlight as fuel. Present and future technologies do not cause a loss in lives nor do they produce toxic wastes. Such solid waste as sodium silicate that results from the chemical etching of silicon is as inert as beach sand and does not represent "toxic waste that is comparable or greater in magnitude as nuclear energy."

In response to your article (April 9) about windmills in Palm Springs, alternative energy production is without question a must. However, it appears that the manufacturers, developers and the Bureau of Land Management have excelled in this area only to fail in the area of land conservation. The windmill farms do seem to multiply at an alarming rate with little or no concern for the physical environment. I applaud the lawsuit filed by Palm Springs against the Bureau of Land Management and the seven developers.

One of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's recently departed advisors has secured a job handling renewable energy business for an international law firm. The mayor's former deputy chief of staff, Dan Grunfeld, 49, is taking a position with the law firm of Kaye Scholer and will work in its Los Angeles office representing clients in such fields as green technology, alternative energy and compliance with environmental laws. Villaraigosa has promised to make Los Angeles "the greenest big city in America" by pushing the Department of Water and Power toward more solar, wind and geothermal energy.